Juanma Lillo has provided perception into Pep Guardiola’s insatiable urge for food to maintain enhancing himself and people around him.
Lillo rejoined his fellow Spaniard’s backroom workers at treble winners Manchester Metropolis this summer time after a 12 months away.
This weekend he will probably be filling in for the inspirational Metropolis supervisor as the previous Barcelona and Bayern Munich boss takes outing to recuperate from again surgical procedure.
Guardiola is because of return to Manchester after the September worldwide break and Lillo expects him to be as hungry as ever.
“Pep is all the time very open, second to second, and he decides he all the time desires to enhance and implement new issues,” stated Lillo, who will oversee the staff at Sheffield United on Sunday and at house to Fulham subsequent week.
“That sense is very sharp. He’s very clever. He grasps not solely what he’s going to do, however with whom he’s going to do it.
“That helps to enhance everybody that is around him. All of us enhance.
“All of us try to to pitch in for Pep to all the time be there, however he doesn’t want a variety of enter as a result of he’s continually constructing and debating and producing concepts.”
Lillo, 57, has had a protracted and various teaching profession with jobs in international locations resembling Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Japan and China in addition to at house in Spain.
He was really Guardiola’s supervisor at Mexican facet Dorados de Sinaloa nearly 20 years in the past and knew even then his former cost would make a very good coach.
“We’ve been working hand in hand for a few years,” stated Lillo, who first joined Guardiola at Metropolis in 2020 earlier than leaving for a job in Qatar two years later.
“He was my participant again within the day. We’ve got a relationship that goes all the best way again and we perceive issues in the identical path.
“When he was a participant it was the identical. He already had a real imaginative and prescient. It’s very tough to search out somebody resembling him with such capability and such willingness.
“He was already a little bit of a coach when he was a participant.”
